The global off-premises cloud service market is forecast to grow at a five-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 19.9 percent, reaching $414 billion in 2022.

Cloud as a service (CaaS) is expected to have the largest growth, with a five-year CAGR of 31.6 percent, followed by platform as a service (PaaS), with a five-year CAGR of 31.3 percent.

Our analysis

To improve agility and realize cost savings, enterprises are migrating applications off-premises to the cloud. Upfront capital expenditures can be shifted to as-needed operating expenditures, by using off-premises cloud services – shifting from investments in equipment and staff to leveraging a cloud service provider’s automated data center infrastructure, supported by highly skilled data center experts.

As enterprises are increasingly driven to adopt off-premises cloud services, cloud service providers (CSPs) are looking for ways to innovate – integrating machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) techniques into their services. These techniques give providers a clear way to differentiate themselves, by building teams of highly skilled experts that most enterprises cannot duplicate.

CaaS and PaaS are emerging markets and continue their strong growth. CaaS targets mainstream enterprises with a complete preconfigured application execution environment that could also be operated on their behalf by a CSP. PaaS targets developers with pre-built application components that allow the application developer to focus on authoring only the business logic specific to their application. With PaaS, architecting the application infrastructure (e.g., database, web servers, compute, load balancing) for scale and operations is left to the CSP.

Following are notable cloud service partnerships that are driving the evolution of multi-clouds:

Adobe, Microsoft and SAP partnered to introduce the Open Data Initiative, designed to provide customers with a complete view of their data across different platforms

Digital Realty extended the connections of its Digital Realty Service Exchange to many of the leading CSPs

Google Cloud and Cisco announced a partnership that improved the connection between Google G suite and Cisco WebEx

AWS and Salesforce expanded their alliance, adding new product integrations for customers to share and synchronize data across AWS and Salesforce Lightning

China Telecom and Huawei established a Business Joint Innovation Center (BJIC) to jointly develop information and communication services and go-to-market plans